Saturday, April 9, 2005

Upgraded Production Servers to 6.5.4

Last night I upgraded my production Domino servers to Notes/Domino Release 6.5.4. I blogged about this release the other day after having upgraded my client (and about 20 others) to Notes 6.5.4 and upgrading my cluster and archive servers (on iSeries and Linux, respectively).

I upgraded my Blackberry Domino server (Windows 2000 Server) to 6.5.4. This upgrade went without a problem.

Then I upgraded my production mail, application and Lotus Instant Messaging servers (all running on a single iSeries) from Domino 6.5.3FP1 to Domino 6.5.4. The only problem after coming back up was that the IM integration with Domino Web Access would not work. I was receiving Domino Web Access (DWA) warnings and after restarting the DWA server with IM disabled there were no errors logging in. So, I figured there was a problem with the DWA/IM configuration from the upgrade. I called Lotus support and was informed that I would have to reinstall the IM software. Since I keep the current install files on the server, all I did was restore the licensed program. After doing so, I restarted the IM server and the DWA server with the setting changed to enable IM. The integration worked after that with no problems. Now all of our Domino servers have been upgraded to the latest release within 1 week´s time.

This was about 10:45 PM EST and the Domino for iSeries technician was extremely helpful and called me back within about 10 minutes (I was promised a call-back within 2 hours, so I was glad it was really fast). He immediately told me that there was a technote discussing the need to reinstall the Domino "Companion Products" (like Lotus Team Workplace and Lotus IM & Web Conferencing) when upgrading the Domino release. I've never had to do this before, but it worked. However, I told him that the release notes should state this. The release notes did mention needing a hotfix to make Team Workplace 6.5.1 work with Domino 6.5.4, but there was no mention of having to do anything for IM.

Regardless, the technician's solution to just reinstall the code (taking about 5 minutes) worked. However, while I was on the phone he was unable to even find the technote. I asked him to forward that to me when he does find it. If it's public I will post a blog link to it.

Oh, the mail server did crash when I brought it up the first time. The call stack from the NSD (crash log) showed that it was on the IMAP task. So I quickly removed the task from the Notes.ini file and the server started up well on it's on. When I reloaded the IMAP task the server hasn't crashed since. I'll chalk that up as a little install glitch unless it crashes again from IMAP.